Social Networking
Social Networking was designed for Affiliate Marketers.
The popularity of Social Networking websites has gone ballistic in the past five years. Facebook and MySpace are the biggies with Bebo, Twitter, Squidoo and others boasting millions of users as well.
YouTube, Wordpress and Digg etc can also be considered social networking sites from our point of view, because they also allow sharing/recommending of popular material with other users of the site.
They are a great way to sell products to people who you know, or who know of you (ie they are a ‘friend’ or ‘follower’).
So if you have a high profile for any reason then you can leverage your Social Network webpage to do a great affiliate sales job for you, simply by posting your hoplinks to products you recommend. You can do the same thing with Twitter and its offshoot TweetDeck, which is great for tweeting about a particular topic.
The great thing about using this sales channel is that you don’t need to build your own website. All you do is add content and make sales.
To use any of the Social Networking you need to register and create a profile – buy you can use a pseudonym or ‘pen name’ if you want.
YouTube
A lot of top affiliates make videos to post on YouTube like crazy, because video ranks so well in organic searches for the relevant keywords.
What’s more if they are good videos (ie shocking, rude or funny) people will pass them on to all their friends, giving your campaign a massive viral boost.
Just don’t forget to put your website address as a graphic on your video.
Tube Mogul is a great free application you can use to upload your videos to YouTube and all the other major websites which host video.
Forums
There are also countless, blogs, forums and message boards for special interest groups. Often these places allow you to post a website address along with your comment.
The idea is to find forums with discussions relevant to the product you’re selling, post a helpful comment (early in the discussion so it will be seen) and then add a link to a website – which can either be to your own site, or a hoplink. Linking to your site is best, because you can imply that there is lots more great stuff there to see. There is also the added bonus of getting back-links, which boost your own site’s Google page ranking.
Whatever you do, always remember that your comments must be useful to other members of the forum. You must not use a hard sell approach – it will just turn them off and might even get you blacklisted. Just casually recommend our product as something that helped you.
There are software products which crawl the web to find relevant forums for you to comment on.
‘Comment Kahuna’ is one that’s free.